Everybody got together in Berkeley commune days

Everybody got together, or so it seemed, in an era of communes

Published 7:03 pm, Friday, October 11, 2013

The exhibit, focusing on one South Berkeley enclave, opens Sunday at the Berkeley History Center.

The exhibit, focusing on one South Berkeley enclave, opens Sunday at the Berkeley History Center.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

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Hal Reynolds (left), Pat Edwards and Lynne Davis work on a model of an exhibit on the communes of Berkeley's utopian past.

Hal Reynolds (left), Pat Edwards and Lynne Davis work on a model of an exhibit on the communes of Berkeley's utopian past.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

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A display presents memorabilia of a commune called the Circus.

A display presents memorabilia of a commune called the Circus.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

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Hal Reynolds reflects on the spirit of the era.

Hal Reynolds reflects on the spirit of the era.

Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle

Everybody got together in Berkeley commune days

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Close your eyes. Inhale the patchouli. Hear the beads swishing in the doorway. Taste the lentil soup. Feel the sandals (if you're a man) or combat boots (if you're a woman).

It's the early 1970s in a lively enclave of South Berkeley, where every block has a commune, and your neighbor, the famed activist Jerry Rubin, just ran for mayor on a platform of free bikes for everyone and legalized marijuana.

That neighborhood, the McGee-Spaulding district about a mile southwest of UC Berkeley, is the focus of an exhibit opening this weekend at the Berkeley Historical Society. The communes, the Zen centers, the food giveaways - all is memorialized on the walls of the city's history museum.

"Makes me feel old," laughed Stan Dewey, a Berkeley attorney who spent the early 1970s in a house known as Karl Marx's Magic Bus on Channing Way. "But if people can look at all this and feel inspired, that's a good thing."

That pocket of Berkeley was, in many ways, the epicenter of the city's radical revolution in the 1960s and '70s, historians said. It abutted the old segregation boundary for African Americans, meaning it was among the first neighborhoods to integrate, and it was close enough to campus to attract students.

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"But mostly it was cheap. Regular people could afford to live there," said Lynne Davis, who moved to the neighborhood in 1963 and remembers walking her kids to school past National Guard troops as they were mustering to storm People's Park. "It was very interesting times."

Veteran of commune

Hal Reynolds, whose home on McGee Avenue was one of the more prominent communes of its day, helped put together the exhibit. McGee's Farm, as it was known, featured chore charts in which the men did the child care, and the women ... well, the women wore a lot of Army fatigues.

At McGee's Farm, the walls were covered with burlap sacks and Indian bedsheets, and the communal meals almost always featured chile rellenos. Residents included an ex-priest and an ex-nun who were now a couple; a woman who provided child care for Tom Hayden's revolutionary cell, the Red Family; and followers of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba, who coined the phrase, "Don't worry, be happy."

"It was a fun time. ... We had this idea that we were smashing the nuclear family and starting something totally new," said Reynolds, now a retired UC Berkeley official.

The concept unraveled by the mid-1970s, when members found themselves burned out by nonstop war protests, endless household meetings and the darker side of the era: the drugs and violence that claimed some of their friends.

Eventually the commune members moved into their own places, and Reynolds, his wife and two children were left with McGee's Farm to themselves.

Other communes

Not far away, though, were the Circus, Dragon's Eye and Karl Marx's Magic Bus, a three-bedroom bungalow that had its own theme song. The refrain was: "Karl Marx's Magic Bus, it's a bus for all of us, and it ain't got no backseat."

The Magic Bus was perhaps the most political of the South Berkeley communes, Dewey said. Members argued about everything from feminist-sensitive chore distribution to the correct anti-imperialist food. On the living room wall was a hooked rug, made by a resident, depicting a Vietnamese woman in a rice paddy with a gun slung over her shoulder. The color motif was Viet Cong red, blue and yellow.

And the food?

"I remember a lot of soybeans. And nutritional yeast," Dewey said.

But all that was background to a belief that they were part of a major historical shift, he said.

"We were all from bourgeois backgrounds, and we wanted to change that. ... Our whole lives were about changing society and the imperialist culture," he said. "But the main thing was that it was fun. All those meetings - they were tedious, but we were having a good time. We were like a family."

These days the neighborhood is neither radical nor diverse. Homes sell for upward of $650,000, and the neighborhood is decidedly more white and less African American, as is the trend throughout Berkeley. The big topic on the neighborhood website isn't Leninism versus neo-Marxism but historic preservation.

Dewey and some of his friends from those days are still in touch and hope the days of the commune aren't over entirely. It's a perfect option for old age, he said.